Only one in 20 workers needed the government's permission to pursue their chosen occupation in the 1950s, notes University of Minnesota Prof. Morris Kleiner. Today that figure is nearly one in three...To work as a manicurist requires only about 12 hours worth of training in Alaska and 40 in Iowa, but 600 hours in Oregon and 700 in Alabama. Does anyone believe consumers in Oregon and Alabama are in need of that much more protection from unsafe manicurists? Or that there is much difference as far as consumer complaints are concerned? Mr. Kleiner compared consumer complaints between Minnesota and Wisconsin in certain health-care occupations and found no differences in the number of complaints between tightly regulated Wisconsin and less-regulated Minnesota. [Chip Mellor & Dick Carpenter, WSJ op-ed]
Damon Root elaborates...
(Nod to Kevin Lewis)
1 comment:
What would be interesting to try to estimate is how much of the % change is a function of the shift to a service economy, with regulations (designed) to protect the direct consumers of services. That is, regulations for things like manicurists because the service is delivered to individual consumers, and not someone working in a large factory with both job training and direct supervision by employers.
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